Countless myths have encrusted the creation and reception of this song, as recounted by Bill Egan. One wishes there was somewhat more documentation on this—the song, after all, was not composed in the time of Shakespeare, when records were kept and preserved indifferently—but then again, I suppose we are lucky to know even what we do about it.
Mohr and Gruber were not, after all, Mozart, Beethoven, or Josef or Michael Haydn, who were all variously believed to be the composers in the first half-century or so after it was created. They had nothing elaborate with which to work—just Mohr’s guitar and the voices of the choir. They never became rich off of a song that people began singing and playing the world over within their own lifetimes. They were simply officials at a village church, with a job to do.
For those of us who work and wonder at the products of our minds, the two men represent a welcome reminder that even ordinary people can create the most extraordinary works.
It’s hard to believe, but the story of these simple, pious men figured in the life of a writer far more famous and far more complicated: Christopher Isherwood, friend of W.H. Auden and author of the “Berlin Stories” that inspired Cabaret. The Weimar Era decadence depicted in that musical certainly described that period in the life of the writer, who early on rejected not only the Anglican faith into which he was baptized but also Christianity and the message of Jesus as a whole.
Throughout his late 40s into his 60s, Isherwood supplemented income from novels with scripts for film and television. None of the latter, oddly enough for someone whose novels burst with colorful detail and insinuating dialogue (for an example, see Mr. Norris Changes Trains), turned out to be particularly memorable.
Except, perhaps, in one small instance, for one small boy: me.
At age eight or nine, I watched one Christmas, on network TV, an hour-long primetime special on how “Silent Night” was composed. From a distance of 40 years, I can’t recall many details about it, aside from the fact that it was a biopic about Franz Gruber.
But a few years ago, while reading the long but often fascinating biography of Isherwood by Peter Parker, I noticed that it mentioned one of his later credits as an expatriate writer-for-hire in Hollywood: a 1968 network special, The Legend of "Silent Night". This must have been the same one I saw. It was shown on TV exactly 150 years to the day when the song was first performed.
At first glance, this struck me as the most incongruous pairing of a religious skeptic and a religious themed script this side of Gore Vidal coming aboard to work on the epic Ben-Hur. It could only have been a job, no more.
On second thought, however, I wondered. True, Isherwood never re-embraced the faith of his childhood. But after he came to the United States with Auden, he experienced a search for meaning that led him to convert to Hinduism, a spiritual journey he chronicled in My Guru and His Disciple. (The “guru” of the title was Swami Prabhavanda.)
That experience, I think, gave him an entrée, a point of sympathy between himself and Gruber, that would not have been possible otherwise—for Isherwood eventually came to translate several Hindu texts into English, including Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God. He had now become intimately familiar with the struggle that the creative artist faces in explaining to others not similarly gifted nor religiously inclined how the deity he embraces has altered his life.
I did not find any tape of this 1968 special in the catalog of the Paley Center for Media. Too bad: the credits (including Isherwood’s) meant little or nothing to me at the time, but nowadays any such array of talent, no matter how seemingly modest the project, would have to be regarded as all-star: narration by Kirk Douglas, music by Alex North (the scores for A Streetcar Named Desire and Spartacus), directed by Daniel Mann (Come Back, Little Sheba), teleplay by Isherwood and Harry Rasky, based on “The Story of Silent Night” by Paul Gallico, and starring James Mason as Gruber.
The Paul Gallico source material raises an interesting question. The sportswriter-turned-popular-novelist retailed a story that had little if any relation to fact: i.e., that “Silent Night” was originally performed with a guitar because the vital parts of the organ at St. Nicholas had been eaten away by mice! A great anecdote, certainly lending itself to the kind of dramatic detail Isherwood would have relished. Did the Hindu convert put this detail in his script?
I don’t know, but it’s certainly worth finding out—something that would be easier to do if those in Hollywood wake up to the interesting creative property they undoubtedly have buried in some vault.
No comments:
Post a Comment